1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to translation requesting methods and translation requesting terminals.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid increase in the global circulation of information brought about by international corporate activity and the spread of the Internet has created higher demand for machine translation, wherein one language (say, Japanese) is translated into another language (say, English), without human intervention. One example of a technology for enhancing the performance of machine translation is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application No. 2003-323425.
However, software offering advanced translation functionality is relatively expensive, which means that it is often difficult for the general user to purchase and use such high-performance software. It is therefore common to request a translation to an external translation server connected by a network.
When requesting a translation to an external translation server from a terminal, it is possible for an ill-intentioned third party on the network to see the content of the request, since the original text data is sent to the destination server over the network. While a method is generally used to send the original text data through a communication channel encrypted using SSL (Secure Socket Layer), TLS (Transport Layer Security), or other kinds of encryption in order to protect the confidentiality of the original text, it is nonetheless possible that even if the encrypted data arrives safely at the destination server, the translation server itself is a “posed” or otherwise fraudulent translation server. For this reason, it has been difficult to completely prevent all types of misuse of information requiring confidentiality (“confidential information”) by third parties, if personal names, the names of products under development, or other kinds of confidential information are contained in the original text information.
The best option in order to fully protect the confidentiality of confidential phrases is not to allow the confidential phrases themselves to get out. A method is conceivable in which a person marks confidential phrases and deletes them. However, even if such a method is implemented, different personnel may have different ideas on which phrases are confidential, causing variations in the results of the method. Even if an effort were made to bring all the personnel into line regarding which phrases are confidential and double-checks were implemented, there nevertheless remains the possibility that a confidential phrase remains undetected and is thereby leaked in case of long original texts.